


moths

by andorgyny



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 07:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1502693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andorgyny/pseuds/andorgyny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You were listening to the police scanners again, she whispers, somehow managing to cover up the hitching in her breath. Damn human endocrine systoh wait, thats his line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	moths

  
He tastes like smoke and summer rain and the chocolate muffin that had gone missing during her shower.

Pulling away, she wraps her arms around his neck and frowns up at him. “Two things,” she murmurs, noting with predatory glee the smugness painted all over his face. They’ve played this game too many times for her not to pick up on the guilty glint in his dark eyes (they’re darkening still and fathomless and oh, she just knows she’s got him cornered).

“First off, you can buy me another muffin when we go into town,” she begins.

“Er, Rose I don’t kn–”

She presses a slim finger to his lips. Something pink and glistening curves against the side of his mouth. Teasingly.

Hazel eyes narrow underneath long lashes. He knows she’s hardly impervious to his oral fixation.

“You were listening to the police scanners again,” she whispers, somehow managing to cover up the hitching in her breath. Damn human endocrine syst–oh wait, that’s his line.

“Nope,” the Doctor says, but the hand on her lower back twitches nervously. Quite right, too; after all, they have had several… discussions about using the police scanners, so many in fact that she’s taken to mentally storing them in their own mental file cabinet.

“Uh-huh.”

It’s not that she sees anything wrong with the Doctor parking their blue FIAT Multipla down the street for an hour or two, static rushing through the stereo as he focuses on the reports. Well, except that he refuses to A) acknowledge that the Doctor Police Scanners Adventures In That Piece Of Shit exist and B) let her join him. And that once or twice a week, he comes home with little scratches and burns and all sorts of abnormal but minor injuries that wouldn’t likely result from “fetching Mrs. Williamson’s cat from a tree” and “definitely not intimidating that Mike from Accounting with the wandering hands.”

Dame Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth, is not stupid. She considers herself quite clever. Besides, it doesn’t take a mind comparable to the Doctor’s to see the overwhelming oddness of the situation, this oddness being relative to his general brand of lovable but more than occasionally disastrous oddness.

But she sees in it his eyes. Even dilated with arousal, it’s there. The indecision, the guilt, the fear. The love, the trust, the ache. His black depths sculpt words, tiny pupil statues crying need and safe and love, love, love you.

And she thinks it’s a bit like looking into a mirror when she truly reads his eyes. Maybe that’s why we work so well, she thinks.

“Rose, I…”

The Doctor’s voice breaks a bit. He tries to look away from her but she firmly grasps his face in her callused hands before he can. “You can’t protect me by locking me away and shutting me out, Doctor. You might have the superior intellect and charm, but I’ve got the doctorate in temporal physics and the gun.”

He rolls his eyes. “Torchwood grunt.”

A manicured eyebrow jumps into her forehead. “Oi, arrogant space prude with a hero complex.”

“I think you’ll find that I’m no prude, Miss Tyler,” her lover growls lowly, running a lazy hand up her skirt and brushing it against her knickers. “And we all have our complexes. Weaknesses, you know.”

She changes her plans. She could probably get a confession out of him in the afterglow.

“Maybe we can go sit an’ not listen to the scanners together, yeah?”

He leans down and kisses her, removing his hand from her inner thigh to wrap his arm around her waist. “I’m modifying the car,” he says when he breaks away from her eager lips. “And well, regardless of the fact that I am a brilliant mechanic… I can’t guarantee that something won’t… happen. Machines are funny things, Rose. And I just don’t want…” He trails off and takes a deep breath. “What I mean to say is that I don’t want you in that car until I’m sure.”

“That it’s safe.”

“Right-eo, Rosie-o.” He grimaces. “Oh blimey, don’t let me say that again.”

Her smile hovers over his swollen lips. “I appreciate the sentiment, but that breaks Rule Number 42.”

“Remind me what that is again?”

 

“‘I will not get myself blown up in some convoluted scheme to keep Rose safe.’”

“Ah.”

Rose runs a hand through his dark hair as the Doctor touches his forehead to hers. “I’m your partner now. If you feel like installing a popcorn machine into the car, let me help. I don’t expect you to share everything in that big head of yours, ‘cause that’s just not fair.” She tugs on his tie, beckoning him closer as she backs into the wall. “But a relationship is a give-and-take sort of thing, so I need to know if you’re going to get yourself killed stalking some alien or petty thief or whatever. And maybe,” she starts while peeling his blue jacket away from his body. “Just maybe, I’m actually safest when I’m with you.”

He snorts playfully as he lifts her shirt over her head, but his voice drips with something deeper, rougher, harder. It’d be erotic if it weren’t so Doom And Gloom. “Safe, like a moth hovering around a lantern.”

“Safe, like two clever people who love each other.”

They don’t make it to the car, mostly because the wall and the couch and the kitchen counter and the floor and the bed and the shower offer more surface area than their old metal box.

Steering wheels tend to put the kibosh on post-shag cuddling, anyway.  
(And yes, the Doctor has indeed been checking the police scanners and chasing troublesome aliens around London because “Torchwood generally makes a mess of things.”)

* * *


End file.
